Traditions
by Death's Daughter
Summary: 9JackRose. For livejournal's fanfic100 challenge. Prompt 93 'Thanksgiving'. Jack doesn't follow most traditions, but he's made up a pretty good one of his own.


"A carnival!" Rose said with delight, as she stepped out of the TARDIS and into a whirlpool of colour. Jack and the Doctor followed behind her, taking a hand each as they headed through the crowd of rainbow feathers and fabric, the festival music throbbing through them,

"The Mogen Thanksgiving Festival." The Doctor said, with a broad grin.

"Thanksgiving?" Rose glanced up at him. "Isn't that, y'know, an American thing?"

"What, the Yanks are the only people allowed to be thankful about something?" The Doctor rolled his eyes. "You humans, think you've got the monopoly on everything."

Rose shared a look with Jack, who grinned at her and shrugged slightly.

"I haven't celebrated Thanksgiving since I was a kid." He said. "Never seen the point."

"Really?" Rose asked. "Why not?"

"It's not exactly the most exciting holiday in the world." Jack pointed out. "Nothing like this." He waved a hand at the carnival dancers around him, glittering and gaudy. One of the women winked at him and brushed against him as she danced past, earning a glare from Rose which made the Doctor grin.

"Come on," The Doctor said, tugging them along. "We've got a party to get to."

------

"So, what, you just…don't celebrate it?" Rose asked, as the three of them sat in a little boat. It was lazily propelling them across a dusky pink lake, fairy lights strung on cables above them while the celebrations continued on the land around them, the music somewhat muted all the way out where they were. The Doctor let out an irritated sigh.

"Oh would you give over on that already?" He asked.

"The Doc's right." Jack agreed. "It's no big deal."

"But I thought it was a really big occasion…"

"Finding a new country's not exactly cause for a party in my time." Jack pointed out. "Considering we've moved on to discovering new planets."

"Never quite got out of the habit of trying to wipe out the natives once you'd found it though, did you?" The Doctor said with saccharine sweetness. Jack held up his hands in mock-surrender.

"The only kind of death I was interested in was _la petite mort_." He shot back, with a leer.

"So, you just ignored it?" Rose pressed, determined to get an answer before the conversation went the way all their conversations did when one or the other of them started speaking a foreign language.

"I joined the Time Agency when I was eighteen." Jack reminded her. "After that I was always jumping timelines. There wasn't much point in keeping track of what was going on back home." He trailed his hand absent-mindedly in the water. "Besides, who did I have to celebrate it with?"

"Your family?" Rose suggested.

"Ha!" Said Jack, and refused to say any more on the matter, flicking water at her instead.

The Doctor, thoroughly sick of the conversation anyway, neatly steered their boat into the side of the Queen's yacht and charmed his way into getting them invites to her private party that evening, despite having taken a rather sizeable chunk out of her yacht's paintwork.

-----

All around them the music was playing, though the booth the Doctor had secured for them was soundproofed somehow, lowering it to a level for conversation. Rose and Jack collapsed off the dance floor, sweaty and out of breath, to grab hold of the drinks the Doctor had acquired. The concoction was iridescent and almost sickly sweet, but they automatically reached for the jug to pour themselves another. None of them were terribly sure how much they'd had to drink already. The Doctor was fine, Jack was glassy-eyed and doing pretty well to hide his state, until he tried to reach for a glass several inches to the right of his own. Rose was drunk, and the other two were fully prepared to take advantage of that in a pleasant way, except it turned out that when Rose was drunk, she remembered things they'd managed to distract her from earlier.

"What - "

"Rose," The Doctor said sternly. "If you bring up what I think you're going to bring up - "

"But I don't get it!" She cried, waving her hands around and throwing a good deal of her drink over some hapless dancer who happened to be passing the booth at the time. "I thought Thanksgiving was like…Christmas! How can you not celebrate it?"

"It's _boring_!" Jack said, a bit more sharply than he'd intended. "It's just…people dressed as Red Indians, eating too much, drinking too much and fighting with Aunt Mabel because she said something nasty about little Tommy at cousin Joseph's wedding!"

"Human Thanksgiving's just a load of people celebrating killing a load of other people and taking their land." The Doctor said, pouring another round of drinks. "The Mogen Thanksgiving – that's the one I brought you here to see, by the way. You know, the one you're completely ignoring?" He shot Rose a pointed look, and she at the decency to flush slightly and a take a mouthful of her drink to try and hide it. "The Mogen Thanksgiving's all about celebrating how wonderful life is, just for the sake of it. No genocide, no turkeys, no fighting - "

"Everyone still drinks too much though." Jack said, knocking back his own drink and pouring another one.

"Least some traditions stay the same." Rose muttered.

"You want a tradition?" Jack asked. "Alright, I'll give you a tradition…I think I can safely say I've spent every Thanksgiving since I was your age in bed with someone. Does that count?"

Rose blinked and looked at the Doctor, who grinned broadly.

"I'd say so." He said cheerfully. "Finally, a human tradition I don't mind following!"

Jack flashed him a wicked grin and Rose downed her drink. She got the feeling it'd pay off to be a little more drunk if those two were planning what she thought they were planning. She was a lot more flexible when she was tipsy.


End file.
